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This is a monthly round-up of all news related to Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL) in China. It includes updates on victims, legal developments and commentary on China’s legalized practice of “Enforced Disappearances.” June 4 Tiananmen anniversary Political re-education in Xinjiang Forced confessions: Vietnam and Gui Minhai 709 update: Wang Yu's passport, lawyers' licenses and new movie on 709 wives
This month, June 4 marked 29 years since the Tiananmen Square crackdown. Despite heavy rains, more than 100,000 people in Hong Kong remembered the massacre at the annual candlelight vigil. A growing localist sentiment meant that some student groups snubbed the memorial, arguing democracy on the mainland wasn’t their main concern. In Taiwan, President Tsai Ing-wen used the anniversary to call on China to embrace democracy: “if China could face up to what had happened it could become the bedrock for China’s own democratic transformation,” she wrote. Beijing was having none of it and rather nastily responded: “Taiwan should stop harping on about the same old thing.” Naturally, China itself did not acknowledge the event, but families of the victims, the Tiananmen Mothers, sent an open letter to Xi Jinping asking him for the Party to accept responsibility for what happened in 1989. They wrote: “Our Chinese Dream is that the June Fourth tragedy will receive a clear accounting, and that justice will be done.” And over at Global Voices, an interesting article uses the anniversary to ask the question: Who are China’s political prisoners? Around 1,000 were behind bars in 2017; over the years about 2/3 have been men, and a staggering half have been Tibetans.
While the mass disappearances of Uighurs in Xinjiang into re-education camps continues, Chinafile invited scholars to offer suggestions on how the world should deal with what is “arguably the most serious human rights violation in China since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.” The consensus was a tough response: vocal criticism, naming and shaming, and sanctions (including using the Magnitsky Act). “[Xinjiang Party Secretary] Chen Quanguo is a clear example of exactly whom the Magnitsky Act was designed to target: an individual who is leading the incarceration of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of citizens simply because of their religious beliefs.” Foreign companies that assist this human rights violation can also be targeted. Heinz, for example, that sources tomatoes from Xinjiang for its ketchup: “will have to determine how much their products contribute to the maintenance of the totalitarian police state in Xinjiang.” While there is still no official recognition of the campaign, RFA continues to trace numbers of people disappeared, village by village. In Qaraqash county, a local official said almost half of the 1,700 households had been rounded up into camps – which amounted to almost all the adult men. The official said they were following a directive that targets Uighurs “born in the 1980s and 1990s as ‘members of an unreliable and untrustworthy generation’." The key western scholar working on the re-education policy, Adrian Zenz, took two interviews this month. He talked with us here and Deutsche Welle here.
In a chilling reminder that the rights abuses of China are so easily spread to its authoritarian neighbours, Vietnam aired the apology and confession of a detained US citizen on television. Speaking in Vietnamese, William Nguyen, a second-generation Vietnamese American who had been arrested at anti-China protests a week before, said: “"I understand that my acts violated the law I regret that I caused trouble for people heading to the airport." The video of the confession is around 0:15 in, here. Efforts to release detained Swedish citizen, Gui Minhai (桂敏海), who was made to appear in three forced confessions in China, continue. In early June, dozens of Swedish newspapers called for his release in an article published in 37 major newspapers and signed by Swedish scholars, journalists, politicians and actors. You can read the article here (in Swedish). The Diplomat made the observation that this move by the Swedish press illustrates just how passive the Swedish government has been in pushing for Mr. Gui’s release.
China has again refused to give Lawyer Wang Yu (王宇) a passport – it was confiscated when she was detained back in July 2015 and never returned to her. Her husband Bao Longjun (包龙军) said: “They said they couldn't process her passport application for reasons of national security.” Travel bans are frequently used to control former political detainees. For Lawyer Wang it means she is unable to visit her teenage son who is studying in Australia. China has now formally revoked the licenses of three 709 lawyers (in Chinese): Wen Donghai (文东海), Li Heping (李和平) and Yang Jinzhu (杨金柱) have now officially had their licences suspended. This ChinaChange article from May gives a run-down of 709 lawyers who are still being harassed by the authorities. Two Hong Kong journalists have made a second film about the 709 Crackdown, released to mark the third anniversary of the event next month. The two-hour documentary, 709 The Other Shore, by Lo King-wah and Kong King-chu, focuses on 12 activists, lawyers and wives who fled into exile to escape harassment in China. Two of those who appear in the film are Jin Bianling (金變玲) , wife of rights lawyer Jiang Tianyong (江天勇) and Chen Guiqiu (陈桂秋), wife of rights lawyer Xie Yang (谢阳).